Obama’s NLRB Continues to Do Big Labor’s Bidding

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is supposed to be an impartial arbiter of labor issues, but under President Barack Obama, the agency has become another arm of Big Labor. I warned you last month that a new rule requiring employers to hand over private employee information to unions was in the pipeline. Well, it looks like it’s official now. According to Fred Wszolek of the Workforce Fairness Institute, the rule requiring employers to supply unions with workers’ home addresses, telephone numbers and email addresses is now official.

This rule will allow unions to intimidate non-union employees into signing up. The unions need more dues to remain viable, and with a shrinking unionized workforce, the NLRB is more than happy to do their bidding. In the video below, Wszolek told Charles Payne of Fox Business Channel that this is the NLRB’s gift to the unions to appease them after the failure of card check legislation. Wszolek said that Congress can vote down these new regulations, and his organization is pushing our representatives to go on the record as to whose side they stand on – the workers or the union bosses.

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The ink was hardly dry on President Obama’s recess appointments of three new Board members, when the NLRB Chairman Mark Pearce announced that he would ask the newly-formed Board to adopt the balance of the Board’s originally proposed Election Rule including its proposed revisions to the Excelsior Rule that would require the disclosure of employees’ personal contact information.

The KEEP Secure Act Will Protect Employee Privacy

To the extent employees provide their employer with their personal e-mail addresses and telephone numbers it is with the expectation that that information will be used for the purposes for which it was provided, which more often than not, is to contact the employee or his/her family in the event of emergency. There is no federal law; however, that protects such private contact information from unwanted disclosure to third parties. The KEEP Secure Act will fill that void during a union organizing campaign by making the requirements of the Board’s existing Excelsior Rule a matter of federal statutory law.

Forcing employers to turn over their employees’ personal contact information is not only inconsistent with employees’ privacy expectations; it is also ruinous public policy. Whether to unionize or not is one of the most important decisions an employee will make. It is a difficult question and for that reason, union elections are often contentious with strong feelings being expressed on both sides of the question. Employees need their private space to calmly consider the issue. Providing union leadership with the personal contact information of workers, however, will enable a union to invade that space and rob employees of the opportunity to carefully consider the union question free from undue influence. Such access could also tempt some unions to use it to pressure, even intimidate and coerce an employee.